This year’s nests

“Enjoy the Spring of Love and Youth, To some good angel leave the rest;For Time will teach thee soon the truth, There are no birds in last year’s nest!” *

A robin is not just for Christmas
kitsch cards and rosy redbreast in sentimental snow
– this blooded bully with its matador caped chest
and eye, beady sharp as scissored beak
is salve for wakeful winter midnights
compulsive songster under urban neon lights
or moonlight when the earth is frozen blue

an Old World flycatcher following the fork
in Spring, worm grubber, collector
of caterpillar, beetle and mite
an eclectic palette that makes the gardener smile

this sometime shadow of a scarlet pimpernel
at the periphery or perched, bold bosomed, on the spade
silent as summer is long before the months of melancholy
mount the moulted throat and I hear in muttered sub song
how winter goeth even before the Fall
– but here is March and eggs, buff pink and specked
are already being warmed in this year’s nests

*”No hay pajaros en los nidos de antano”. Longfellow making much of an old Spanish proverb in: “It is not Always May”
but for now it is the March equinox and the first day of Spring for Northern Hemispherers. And here’s a Robin on the wing in the Imaginary Garden’s Tuesday Platform!

So very nice, Laura. I loved the robins, we don’t have them here. And our Spring, it came back for one day, 71°F for today, yesterday 87°F and will be 80’s for the rest of the week (East Texas Gulf Coast area). The hatching and babies don’t get much press, yours seem also to be fairly private. When one leaves too early and sits on the ground for a while is when I see them, very vulnerable for attacks.
..

I love robins, Laura! We have several that visit our garden and one that alights on the hedge when I arrive home. It sits and sings to me as I open the front door. I love the lines:
‘compulsive songster under urban neon lights
or moonlight when the earth is frozen blue’
and
‘this sometime shadow of a scarlet pimpernel
at the periphery or perched, bold bosomed, on the spade’,
especially the alliteration on ‘p’!